The award-winning film score composer and producer scored his first film soundtrack back in 2002, going on to win the Best Score award at that year's Atlantic Film Festival. He's since scored a wide range of Canadian documentaries and films. His home studio, The Shire, is based in Nova Scotia and recently an SSL Nucleus control surface with MX4 and Alpha-Link MADI SX virtual console and I/O system installed.

"I have always mixed in-the-box--something of a necessity when you live in a small apartment! But about five years ago, I moved to a house with a basement and The Shire film scoring studio became a reality," explains Illyas. "But then I discovered, SSL's MX4 and Alpha-Link. As soon as I incorporated them into my set up, the sound of the studio was transformed. All of a sudden, we could hear things we never knew were there--and our old mixes sounded just horrible! The SSL gear revealed how our ears had been tricked with poor quality converters and pro-sumer soundcards."

"We then decided we wanted to work with 'real' equipment--tape, preamps, a console. But big studio analogue gear is expensive, so I set out to see how I could use the computer to recreate a proper, large-format SSL console. And that's when I discovered MX4, the world of MADI and SSL console plug-ins. We wanted to create the zero-latency set-up that one is privileged to work with in bigger studios with analogue consoles. Now we've set up a virtual SSL console by using a pair of Alpha-Link MADI SXs, an MX4 MADI card, the SSL's Soundscape Mixer with SSL plug-ins on each channel strip and a Nucleus to drive the whole ship. The sound is just unbelievable."